Free Lynch by Peter J Merrigan Page A

backs of her knees were damp. Even her hair seemed to be sweating from the roots.
    Katherine sat down opposite her and twirled the ice around in her glass with her finger. ‘Jesse’s lovely,’ she said.
    Clark smiled. It wasn’t difficult to see where this conversation would go but she let Katherine get there in her own time. ‘He is. He’ll be good for Scott.’
    ‘He’s great with horses.’
    ‘He’s great with Scott, too.’
    Katherine closed her eyes. ‘Yes. He needs someone like that in his life. Ever since Ryan died, I’ve been worried about him. About how he was coping.’ She sat back and looked at Clark . ‘You didn’t see how he was when we moved here. He was…a wreck.’
    ‘He never said,’ Clark told her.
    ‘He doesn’t like to talk about it. Things got pretty dark for a time. I thought I was going to lose him, too.’
    ‘He means a lot to you,’ Clark said.
    Katherine nodded slowly. ‘It was tough, watching him go down that route—the alcohol, the darkness; I was terrified he’d do something silly.’
    She stared into her glass of tea and remembered a time when she woke to the sound of Scott crying in the kitchen. The hoarse, heart-wrenching sobs that bubbled up from the pit of his stomach sent shudders of sadness and panic through her.
    She didn’t even stop to put on her dressing gown and she hobbled, without her cane, down the stairs and crossed into the kitchen. She knelt beside him as he sat on the floor, repeatedly thumping the back of his head into the fridge, and she took his shoulders and pleaded with him to stop it, to stop hurting himself.
    He cried into her arms and rocked himself as he clung to the dregs of a bottle of vodka and she hushed him and kissed his hair and wiped away his tears as they continued to fall.
    He had been crying so hard he was struggling for breath, his mouth wide, tears and saliva and vodka on his lips, his temple veins throbbing.
    ‘It’s okay, honey,’ she told him. ‘I’m here, my love. It’s okay.’
    ‘Make it stop,’ he cried. ‘Please make it stop.’
    ‘It’s okay.’
    ‘I want it to be over, Margaret.’
    ‘It’ll get better, Kane,’ she said as she smoothed his hair.
    ‘I couldn’t do it,’ he said. ‘I can’t do it.’
    ‘It’s okay, honey.’
    And he continued rocking himself in her arms and crying and hugging the bottle of vodka and pleading with her to make it be over. ‘I can’t do it,’ he kept saying. ‘I want it to be over but it won’t be.’
    She held him tight and hummed to him and they sat that way for over an hour, long after he had stopped crying, long after he had stopped mumbling wretched sorrow and she was sure he had fallen asleep. She prised the vodka bottle from his arms and she took a cushion from a chair and helped him lie down and she noticed, deliberately placed in the middle of the table, the block of knives that normally sat on the countertop by the oven, and beside the wooden block, the only framed photograph of Ryan that he had slipped under the radar from Clark and Wilson when they’d gone into protection. She had begged him to get rid of it but he hadn’t.
    She put the knife block into a cupboard out of sight and sat down beside Scott, running the backs of her fingers along his cheek and holding the image of Ryan to her chest until the sun broke in shards through the blinds onto the floor.
    She looked back at Clark .
    ‘He’s come a long way,’ Clark said.
    She nodded. ‘He’s all I have now. I’m just worried about him.’
    ‘But he’s happy,’ Clark told her. ‘Certainly happier than I’ve ever seen him.’
    ‘But at what cost?’ Katherine asked. ‘Now all he has is a lie.’
    ‘He has you. And Jesse, and me.’
    ‘You and I know his past. Can he ever really have Jesse? Truly? If this develops into something bigger, Jesse will never know Scott’s truth, he’ll never know the Kane we love. Everything will be a lie, and you can’t base a relationship on lies—look